Love, war and loss: How one soldier in Ukraine hopes to be made whole again
Everything was dark and little made sense when Andrii Smolenskyi finally regained consciousness.
"The whole mission was just a dream," he thought to himself as he lay in bed. "Why's it so dark?"
Andrii, still groggy from having just awakened, thought the blanket was draped over his head.
"Then I realized that I couldn't pull off the blanket," he recalls.
And he could feel something over his eyes, which at first he dismissed as a sheet, until he got a feeling deep in his gut that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong.
He fell back asleep, for how long he's not sure. But when he awakened a second time, Andrii recalls, he could vaguely hear doctors speaking nearby. He tried to call for help but couldn't utter a word — there was an incision in his neck and a ventilator tube in his throat.
Unable to speak, he tried to spell out his questions in the air, waving a stump instead of his hand: "What's happened to me? What's happened [to] my hands? Do I have my hands? Why can I not see?"
Andrii's mind raced as he tried to quantify the loss of the life he once knew. As he lay in bed suspended in disbelief, he felt a presence in the room with him and then a gentle touch on his leg.
https://www.npr.org/2023/08/27/1194391578/ukraine-soldier-war-injury-prosthetics-amputation
I lost someone I loved in Vietnam, of just such wounds. This story brings it all back.
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